I called a friend who is a believer...

[MTL]

You skipped a step, GC.


Old Baby did NOT make a choice to stop believing in God, per se.

He made a choice to be honest with himself.

...and it was THAT, in turn, which made belief in God impossible.

Twisting words changes nothing, he made choices that led to his nonbelief it's all part of the one and same process. 

GC

I twisted nothing. 

For you to say that he "chose not to believe in God"
when what he actually chose was to be "honest with himself"
means that it is YOU who twists his meaning and thus put words in his mouth.....not I.

My sister does that.

She twists the shit out of words,
and then when I untwist and clarify them,
she accuses me of twisting them.

Classic Cognitive Dissonance.

Such sublime arrogance, GC....to dictate to people what THEY meant to say
but distorting their words slightly...

...and then, diabolically, accusing the person who CLARIFIES the words
as being the one who twisted them.

Sounds to me like something Lucifer would do, to be honest.

Play fair and have some integrity, man.

It's the same type of maddening attempt at manipulation
(and insult to my intelligence...like I'd let you get away with something so pedestrian)
that initially inspired the beginnings of my revolt against religion, in the early days.

In other words,

it is Christians like yourself that drive further afield
the very people you claim to wish to attract.

And although I despise all religion,

I will readily state that not all xtians are like yourself.

I know a few Christians, myself, who would almost certainly find your manoeuvrings quite unsavoury
and would likely agree with me that they are the epitome of everything that xtianity should NOT be.



And another thing:

I am Agnostic; I allow for the possibility that there is a God.

and, if there IS a God,

He will know that all I've ever been is honest about my approach to Him.

If He is actually synonymous with Truth,
then He cannot fault me for that...

....even if it meant questioning whether or not the Bible/Qu'ran/Torah/Whatever is REALLY "His Word"
....or if stupid fallible corrupt control-freak humans just SAID it was His Word.



Many, many times I have thought to myself what a shame it is that there is probably no God,
because if there WAS a God that was synonymous with Truth,

then, ironically,

He would probably LOVE guys like Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens (and Old Baby, for that matter)
who used the brain that He gave them,
and endeavored to pursue the real TRUTH of the matter to the best of their ability.

If there really is a God,
I suspect that if it were to turn out that there WILL be one day where we all stand before Him,

it is the Religious of the world that will have a terrible shock coming,
for all the awful shit they've said and done in His name,

...and their sad excuse will be that they CHOSE to follow some stupid book
that other stupid humans told them was "God's Word"

...when in fact it was NEVER anything of the sort.

[Old Baby]

I'm going to ignore your assumptions about my Christian life, because you simply don't know what you're talking about.  If there's something about my deconversion story that you find confusing or need more information about, I'm happy to explain.

I gave you some things to explain and you ignored them, you just said you stopped believing. No one stops anything with out making some decisions along the way and those choices are part of the choice for disbelief. By the way you didn't have a Christian life you were living a lie, a lie you concocted. When a Christian (one who knows Christ) tells me they have deconverted but know God exists then I believe them, they knew yet decided to leave the faith, read scripture this is there. 

Here's what I'd like to know from you, a true Christian, who will never be swayed from your relationship with God:

You're correct nothing could change what I believe. Now I believe I asked you to provide evidence for your disbelief before you asked these questions, I believe first things first, what ever you have to say wouldn't necessarily change my response to your questions. I would like for this to be a friendly conversation and hope you do. I'm finished answering the post of others because they are being hostile and I want let a gang butt into this conversation.

GC

I don't think you know what friendly conversation is.  You just told me that I've been living a lie that I, myself, concocted.  This is true, but not in the sense that you're implying.  I'm sure that I did live a lie, but I'm convinced that you are also, though you are likely too stubborn to ever let yourself see it.  None the less, I'm going to be patient with you because I'm interested in seeing where this goes.

What do you want me to explain that I haven't?  I went back through the thread and can't really find any specific questions, only assumptions and accusations.  Are you wanting me to re-explain why I'm no longer a believer?  Fine, for all the good it will do.

First let me say that I fully appreciate your position, having been there myself.  Christians can't accept that someone left the faith because they stopped believing in God.  In order for their world to make sense, the person exiting has got to have an ulterior motive.  Either they become atheists because they can't reconcile their wild appetite for sin with the reality of eternal damnation or otherwise they are just people who never had a legit experience with God in the first place and were just pretending all along.  I get all that.  

What brought me to the realization that I didn't believe? 

Doubt.  Doubts caused me to question.  Questions caused me to research.  Research brought me to knowledge.  Knowledge turned a few nagging questions into a dozen or more nagging questions.  Still, I rationalized it all away for a while.  I told myself that God is Truth and Truth is God, so there's no need to hide from reality.  I said that contradictions only seemingly existed because of things that we didn't understand yet.  But, I began to question my subjective experience too.  What was there to lose?  I had no desire to lie to myself.   Again, God is Truth and Truth is God, right?  All I wanted was to find out what was really True, and my conscience would not allow me to stop that search just because I might find something inconvenient.  I began to reason out my beliefs and found more and more things that just didn't make sense to me.  It was like trying to fit the square peg in the round hole.  

I stopped believing because I no longer believed.  It just dawned on me.  There was no "choice".  It was like waking up from one of those dreams where you immediately want to go back to sleep and pick up where you left off, but the longer you lay there trying to get back to sleep, the more reality creeps in and reminds you how ridiculous your imagination can be.

It was like when Captain Kirk destroys the Nomad probe by repeating "Everything I say is a lie" and Nomad starts sparking and smoking and saying "Cannot compute.  Cannot compute.  Cannot compute.  Systems overloading."  Then, Nomad suddenly realizes how vulnerable he actually was right before he explodes.

Willing myself to continue believing what I didn't believe was simply impossible.  At that moment, it made as much sense to feign believing in God as it made sense to suddenly start believing in Poseidon.  I realized that my entire basis for belief was indoctrination from childhood, not on evidence or rationale or even choice.  Even in a subjective sense, there was nothing that I ever experienced as a believer that couldn't be explained naturally, and I witnessed nothing in 30+ years of Christianity to make me believe that anyone's subjective experience was anything more than a delusion brought on by hope, superstition and fear of the unknown.  I realized that religious belief demanded faith for a reason - because it's outrageous mythology.  I realized that religious denominations were all in disagreement over the message of the bible for a reason - because it has no cohesive message.  I realized that the bible was wrong about cosmology and biology for a very good reason - because it was written by "inspired" men.  It's no more inerrant than an inspired sermon or an inspired hymn or an inspired novel. 

I didn't immediately stop praying or doing religious things.  In fact, I prayed more seriously than I've prayed in a long time, because I didn't really want to believe that I had been deluded all that time, or that all of my family and friends are deluded.  But, I heard only silence.  I kept going to church with an open mind, leaving myself open to the possibility that something could be said that would bring me back.  Instead, everything I heard just seemed ridiculously absurd.  It's like I became a new person overnight.

[Minimalist]

You're correct nothing could change what I believe.

And you probably have no clue how utterly ignorant that makes you sound, G-C.

[The Grand Nudger]

Must have been a jarring experience OB.  How did you hang? What did you do to reduce the discomfort?

[Old Baby]

Must have been a jarring experience OB.  How did you hang?  What did you do to reduce the discomfort?

I immediately started watching stuff on Youtube.  I found Dan Barker and heard his story, being a pastor for 19 years before becoming an atheist.  Then I watched a bunch of debates and it dawned on me how dishonest the apologists are, throwing endless logical conundrums at their opponents just to create a smokescreen to hide their lack of evidence or even logic.  Everything I watched just confirmed again and again that I was on the right track.  I gorged on Atheist Experience, Dan Barker, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.  It was not at all unlike the born again experiences that I've heard about in church.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sometimes I feel cheated.  We've got folks on these boards that have had -two-  fantastic "born again" style experiences (one on the way in, one on the way out)......and I get nada.  What was the singlemost pernicious aspect of faith...the last thing you believed? The final redoubt of piety?

[Old Baby]

Sometimes I feel cheated.  We've got folks on these boards that have had -two-  fantastic "born again" style experiences (one on the way in, one on the way out)......and I get nada.  What was the singlemost pernicious aspect of faith...the last thing you believed?  The final redoubt of piety?

I don't think I could name just one.  Here's a couple:

1. God's will is paramount.  Always consult God on everything.  Want to do something fun?  Ask God first.  Don't let distractions clutter up your mind because God wants to talk to you.  Have you heard from God?  Do you know God's purpose for your life?  Seek God's purpose.  My search for God's will led me on so many ridiculous paths that came to nothing.  Other times I didn't act when I should have because I was trusting God to deliver everything to my doorstep.

2. God hates my sexuality until I'm married.  Don't have sex.  Don't masturbate.  Don't look at women.  Don't think about women.  Don't kiss or touch on dates.  Just sit around with blue balls and think about God.  This area of my Christian life was where I beat myself up more than any other.

[Godscreated]

[Red_Wind]

What's it called again when a person makes up stories and then forces themselves to believe said stories? (referring to Godchild's post)

[robvalue]

Sometimes I feel cheated.  We've got folks on these boards that have had -two-  fantastic "born again" style experiences (one on the way in, one on the way out)......and I get nada.  What was the singlemost pernicious aspect of faith...the last thing you believed?  The final redoubt of piety?

I've had plenty of odd experiences which I could quite easily take as "a sign" if I wasn't sceptically minded. Would you say you've had the same? Listening to anecdotes, it really doesn't take much to impress some people.

Stacey on Eastenders has been doing the perfect protrayal of a religious mind filled with fantasy, she sees "signs" in everything that happens. It is made obvious to the viewer that she has lost her mind, although she really doesn't sound any different to the totally entrenched, fantasy obsessed religious theist. (This is a small subset, if it's not obvious. I'm not saying all theists are remotely like this.)